5
5
6
6
1
1
.
.
I
I
N
N
T
T
R
R
O
O
D
D
U
U
C
C
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
T
T
O
O
A
A
N
N
I
I
N
N
C
C
A
A
R
R
N
N
A
A
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
upon which I might draw in my study of Sathya Sai Baba. And the same is true of
avatar ideas in general, not to mention parallel concepts in other cultures. Par-
rinder (1970:7) writes in this regard that ‘the source literature is immense… and
nobody could hope to read it all’. Perhaps Sathya Sai Baba’s statement at top here
is not as hyperbolical as one might think.
Certainly, in line with what we saw earlier of his generally evasive manner, any
attempt to question Sathya Sai Baba himself about his identity is unlikely to be
very informative
3
. And, in any case, there is little chance of my getting another in-
terview with him—he spoke to very few foreigners during my second visit to his
ashram, and at the end of our interview he told our group (Fig.6) that we were
‘very, very lucky’ to spend time with him. Most of his time during my second visit
to his ashram was consumed in talking to various VIPs, with very little spent on
the general public. Furthermore, despite such apparent neglect, crowds at the
ashram had increased since my first visit—and would no doubt have been even
greater were it not for the rash of bad press that had appeared against him in be-
tween times. Most of the group agreed that we had only been given a chance to
talk to him because of our being accompanied to the ashram by Mata Betty—who
has since passed on. Without such an “inside” connection, there is almost no
chance of my getting to talk to Sathya Sai Baba again. I also have insufficient “in-
side” contacts (and indeed am insufficiently well versed in the local language Te-
lugu) to make any thorough attempt at interviewing any of the other figures who
might be able to contribute significantly to an understanding of Sathya Sai Baba’s
avatar claim. Fortunately, however, there is no shortage of accounts by such peo-
ple published in English translation, and indeed no shortage of English translations
of Sathya Sai Baba’s own writings and speeches.
How to go about studying these? Simply put, the key questions that I will be
considering in this study as a whole are as follows. Firstly, what does Sathya Sai
Baba say of (especially himself as) an avatar? This might seem like a simplistic
question, but we will soon see some problems with the works of scholars who
have jumped to conclusions based upon less than complete answers to this ques-
tion. Part of my task will thus be descriptive—a thorough consideration of all po-
tentially relevant primary sources (facilitated by digital searches of Sathya Sai
Baba’s works for “avatar” and its synonyms), and an attempt to give a representa-
tive account of these. This is no small task, but I have already done a little of it
3
See p.405 for something approaching such an attempt (albeit directed by Sathya Sai Baba himself).
1
1
.
.
3
3
E
E
x
x
p
p
l
l
a
a
i
i
n
n
i
i
n
n
g
g
E
E
m
m
b
b
o
o
d
d
i
i
m
m
e
e
n
n
t
t
5
5
7
7
above and it is reasonably straight-forward. I must then ask, however: “Why does
Sathya Sai Baba say what he does about (himself as) an avatar?” And this is not
so easy to answer. Bill Aitken (2004:128-129), in his recent sympathetic biogra-
phy of Sathya Sai Baba, points out that:
Inevitably, with such a voluminous number of discourses available for study, it is
possible for critics to ‘prove’ almost anything about Sathya Sai. By selecting pas-
sages out of context they can show him to be a communist, capitalist, monarchist,
republican, conservative, liberal, orthodox or non-conformist.
But my comprehensive answer to the first of my questions ought to help in this re-
gard. And I will, naturally, consider something of the context of the passages I
will be citing—from questions of audience and occasion (I will discuss this
shortly), to the sociology of Indian religion in general (I will do something of this
in the next chapter), to the biographical “development” of Sathya Sai Baba’s per-
sona (again, I will do a little of this shortly).
I will also consider the immediate textual context of these passages, primarily
with a view to understanding Sathya Sai Baba’s purpose in using them. Sathya Sai
Baba’s ethical and spiritual messages in his speeches are usually made quite clear
by this, but I often found such context to be less than helpful in understanding the
details of the avatar traditions to which he refers. Hence, I will focus upon outlin-
ing the historical background of these traditions—presenting a rough history of the
concept of the avatar, from earliest times to the present, as it relates to Sathya Sai
Baba’s ideas. Through this, we can get some idea as to how various details of the
avatar traditions originated, and as to how they developed in to forms similar, or
parallel, to those that Sathya Sai Baba invokes. Only against this background can
we get a good sense as to how and why Sathya Sai Baba adopts and/or adapts
them (as the case may be). Even if I fail in all of this, my proposed approach will
at least provide a further framework for my answer to my first question. And, I
would add, it also better provides the potential for me to make a contribution to
general scholarly understandings of traditional (and other modern) avatars. Per-
haps Sathya Sai Baba’s ideas can shed some light upon these, even if they are of
little help in understanding him.
Looking at the title of my study: ‘Sathya Sai Baba as Avatar: “His Story” and the
History of an Idea’, I should perhaps emphasize that I am not attempting here to
write a full history of the idea of the avatar—much less a biography of Sathya Sai
Baba. Rather, as my title can be, and as I intend it to be, read, the focus of my
study is the intersection between what I can determine of the history of ideas of